The rage hit me all at once, like a shot of adrenaline right in the center of my chest. It boiled out of the dark places inside me, crawling through the cracks in the mask of bored acceptance I had worn for so many years. I had been quiet for so long. I had gone the way they had wanted for so long. I had been who they wanted me to for so long; since that day, since the first time I had ever held a gun. I had buried it, the anger, the loss, all the fire that had kept me alive through the dark times. That kind of thing wasn’t suitable for the civilized world. That practically feral little girl didn’t fit in the new, sanitized, reconstructed, hopeful tomorrow that El Presidente was making. I didn’t make it through the war by being soft. I didn’t crawl out of the nuclear wreckage of my home and make it through all those years by being a ‘lady’, whatever that meant anyways. I had been who the state wanted, but they weren’t here anymore. I was completely alone, and though I might have made myself forget it, I was better this way. Stronger this way. Tigers didn’t live in packs.
Galvanized by the fury coursing through my muscles, I dropped the gun at my side and sat up, shedding scraps of rubble and chunks of ice that had been piled on my armored chest. Though my trapped position robbed my fists of the full power I might have put into the blows, I used the substantially augmented strength of my armor and slammed steel-clad knuckles into the boulder that trapped my legs. The blows did nothing at first. That much ice had quite a bit of mass, and strength to match. But ice was always somewhat brittle, and there were cracks somewhere. I just had to hit it and keep doing it until I won. I pounded the ice over and over, keeping my rhythm even as my muscles started to burn; each blow drove straight forward like a hammer, each strike like the repeating action of a jackhammer. I did this for a quarter of an hour before I heard the first crack. Another quarter-hour and the crack was wide enough for me to wriggle my armored fingers into. I stopped my metronomic assault and forced both hands into the little space I had opened. I strained my already burning shoulders and I began to tear it open wider. It didn’t want to give in, I wasn’t stopping, and I had the enhanced strength of my armor on my side. I forced that crack wider, and wider, until the ice started giving off sounds like a firecracker. I screamed and pushed as hard as I could, and without warning, the boulder let out a violent BANG and came apart, splitting neatly into two jagged pieces. No longer balanced in its place atop my legs, the two halves of the massive chunk of ice shifted, and I was able to pull one of my legs free with a screech of grinding metal. With one leg free, getting the other one out was a simpler effort, and within a few minutes, I was standing in a low cavern, peering about at the wreckage around me for somewhere I could start putting things back together.
I bent and picked up the gun from where I had dropped it, and I shook my head. I couldn’t believe I was about to… I shook the thought from my brain and holstered the weapon quickly, letting go of the grips like I had been holding onto the tail of a venomous snake. It was time for me to figure out where I could go from here. Like it or not, I still had a mission on this hateful planet, and it wasn’t getting done while I just sat in the darkness feeling sorry for myself.
I picked through the wreckage, shifting aside chunks of ice. The real trick of things would be to find my Fabricator. That piece of equipment had been designed to survive anything short of a direct shot from a Pan-American gunship, and even that might only crack the case. If I could find the rugged little box, I could start again. I didn’t know what had happened to Barbas, but I didn’t think he would be there when I got into that damned Bullet back in terrestrial orbit. I knew what I needed to do, was to rebuild my Terraformer Engine, though the trick with the storm generator Barbas had rigged up, might be a little beyond me. I would have to start small, this time thinking about defenses, about concealment. Maybe I could start here, below the ice.
I ran a self-diagnostic on my suit, along with a medical scan. The suit was mostly fine. The breach my HUD had warned me about was an inch-long puncture in the durable Environmental Envelope, most likely by a chunk of ice or a shard of metal during my fall into the glacier. The suit was using negative pressure to keep the outside atmosphere at bay, but I was leaking my suit’s excess nitrogen doing so, and before long, I wouldn’t have any. If I had the Fabricator, I could both patch my suit and replenish my nitrogen supply from the surrounding atmosphere. Barbas hadn’t said much about the air on Chalice, mainly because breathable or not, it was cold enough to turn my lungs into popsicles. I had read a chemical breakdown at some point in those few weeks while working on the tower, but I had let the AI handle most of the technical details, assuming he would be around to help me for the next decade. Rookie mistake, that had been, relying on someone else. Joanna Angeles, ward of the state, might have needed other people, but who I had been before I had been given that name… well, that bedraggled, vicious little cub had grown up, and the tigress needed no one. I had to remember that.
I picked my way through the wreckage, finding almost nothing of value. My suit’s diagnostic told me that the nutrient stores in my suit’s tanks were still fairly full, and I wouldn’t run out of synthetic sustenance for quite some time. It would be a little bit of a strain, not having the wonderful dream-meals that Barbas constructed, but the truth was, I hadn’t actually physically eaten since I had left the Earth. The suit handled all of that, very efficiently, and I was happy to say those systems were still working fine. Even as those thoughts crossed my mind, I felt the subtle pulse of cool relief spread from a place in my neck down through my body, as my armor injected a burst of saline solution into my big veins. I was going to be fine. I was going to survive, and, if need be, I would deal with the natives. I had tried being nice. I had tried diplomacy. But they had killed the messenger, and then they had tried to kill me. The tigress didn’t do diplomacy much, either. Maybe I should have been the one born with fucking fangs.
I looked up, shining my headlamp at the way I had fallen, trying to determine if climbing back up was a possibility. It didn’t look like it was. The cavern I was standing in was actually more of a narrow, pipe-like crevasse, extending nearly straight up into the darkness. Blocking most of the upper limits of that twisting, uneven shaft was a truly massive piece of glacial ice. I was incredibly lucky it had wedged where it did. If that had landed on me, I would never have gotten out from under it. I would have been ground into paste, armor or not, and no one would ever have found my body. I wondered how far down I had really gone. My suit’s communication network wasn’t picking up signals from any of my equipment, but that could be for a couple of different reasons. Either I was so far down that nothing was reachable, or everything I had built had fallen and smashed into pieces. Neither scenario would help me much. I needed another way out.
I spent the next half an hour examining the little cavern, searching the walls for any signs of weakness, any inkling that there was a way out of this pit. I didn’t find anything on the first pass, but when I activated my suit’s sonar array and started pinging the walls at random intervals, an exit presented itself. One wall was reading as covering a hollow place. Hopefully, it wasn’t just another small cavern with no exits. Taking a deep breath, I set myself and then, yelling like some kind of Kung Fu fighter in a movie, I drove my shoulder against the ice. This time, with the full weight of my armor and the full leverage of my augmented legs and abs, I smashed straight through the ice, sending shards flying everywhere.
I stood in a crooked, downward sloping passage, leading down into unknown darkness. Likely it was little more than a random crack in the ice, or a tunnel bored by one of this moon’s strange, sub-surface creatures. It was a strange thing, standing inside a glacier and knowing that somehow, against all terrestrial logic, there was life all around her. How did it all survive? How did it get here? Before I could get caught up in the ‘deep questions’, I sighed and trudged into the darkness. There was only going to be one way out of this mess, and that meant moving forward. Even if the way forward was also the way down.
/> Chapter Twenty-Four
Joanna
In the Dark
I proceeded like that for what seemed like days, but what might only have been a couple hours. Passages wound about through the ice, sometimes crossing each other, sometimes coming to a dead end. I would climb what seemed like dozens of meters, only to find myself struggling down a shaft so steep it was practically vertical. Twice I found little pocket caverns like the one I had fallen into, and I searched what wreckage had gathered there. I found only twisted scrap and shattered ice, the remains of a month’s hard work. Once, I even found a crumpled, ice-white humanoid body, battered into a pulp. I couldn’t tell if it was the Stormwalker or someone else. Hell, I couldn’t tell if the corpse had been male or female, it had been so thoroughly destroyed. I passed it by and continued my search of the cavern, and then, finding nothing, I moved on. Time passed by and I grew more and more tired as the nitrogen balance in my suit dropped lower and lower. The despair I had felt trapped beneath the chunk of ice began to trickle back into my chest as the old familiar anger that had saved me, began to gutter and flicker with inaction. I had just begun to think I was going to die again when I saw it. In a narrow hole, a ‘room’ barely wider than the passage I was following, there sat the Fabricator, wedged at an angle into the frozen floor, practically framed in a shaft of dim light.
I dashed forward and seized the hefty little machine, checking it over for damage as if I was a child that had just tripped and fallen to the floor. It was blessedly intact, barely even scratched, and for a moment I just stood there, cradling it to my chest and wondering what the hell they had made the little indestructible box out of. The machine’s internal power source was still good, and as soon as I touched it, my wireless network finished negotiating its formidable firewall and connected. The machine immediately began chattering loudly, little slots opening up in its impervious shell and spewing forth a cloud of nanites like strangely animate wisps of black smoke. I followed the path of the nanite cloud with my eyes, watching them rise up toward the wreckage, trapped in a crush of ice shards in the ceiling. This had apparently been a crevasse like the one I had fallen into, and a similar situation had occurred here.
Part of a standing work lamp jutted from the ceiling, one of its bulbs miraculously intact. There must still have been some charge on its capacitors because it was giving off an inconsistent, crackling blue light- the shaft of illumination I had seen when I first spotted the blessed Fabricator. The nanites swirled across the wreckage, and some of the metal and plastic dissolved where they touched. Then they shot back towards me and began to whirl and circle about my armor, erasing scratches and tears in the metal, patching the hole in my hermetic seals in a bare instant. A moment later, the buzzing and chattering sounds stopped, and my suit’s monitors told me that once more I was completely protected from the atmosphere of Chalice. I smiled grimly. At least something was going right in this whole mess. With the Fabricator, I could do almost anything. Sure, I would have to program it myself since Barbas was somehow missing, but I could do that. I knew how. The tigress didn’t need anyone.
I reached over one shoulder and slid the Fabricator into place, feeling a groove open in the little box just large enough to fit the retaining pins jutting from my suit for such a purpose. With a click, the device secured itself to my armor, and I was ready for what came next. I could do this. I could absolutely survive whatever Chalice threw at me. I was ready, and I was going to teach that frozen, shitty moon who the boss was here. A loud rattling, clicking sound from behind me startled me out of my self-congratulation and I whirled quickly, my hand falling to the butt of my gun.
Filling the passage I had just come from, there was something that seemed to have come out of a nightmare. It was hideous and segmented, plated with glossy black chitin that seemed to glisten in a manner that seemed… unclean somehow. Its head was that of an ant, though it had entirely too many mandibles where its mouth was. I couldn’t really see much of its body past its first segment, but even the little I saw was large and insectoid, armored in chitin, and possessed too many legs. “Hi,” I said weakly. “You must be a burug.” Volistad had told me about them. Barbas had shot one of the big ones with the Tower’s gun, but I hadn’t been able to go see the body.
According to Volistad, they were Chalice’s consummate predators, strange insects that tunneled through solid ice with disturbing ease, feasting on whatever kinds of life existed deep within the ice. This one seemed ready to feast on me. My armor, apparently, meant little to its ravenous insectoid brain. It made that clicking sound again, and I watched its mandibles ripple and twitch as its wide jaws worked, dribbling greenish fluid onto the ice beneath it. The viscous drool smoked and sizzled away into vapor, and when it was gone, the ice was pitted and scarred, as if it were flesh scarred by acid. I opened my mouth to curse, but the burug suddenly shot forward, propelled by its many legs, gnashing its jaws in anticipation.
I didn’t even think about it. I turned on my boot heel and ran, scrambling for the passage on the other side of the room, down into further unknown and darkness. I couldn’t fight something like that, not in quarters like this. My choices were run or die. It seemed that Chalice wasn’t done trying to kill me. But I wasn’t finished either. I was going to give that damned creature and its stupid moon a run for its money. I put up my hands to protect myself from whatever I might run into in the dark and sprinted. Damn whoever decided to send me here, I thought. Damn them directly to hell.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Volistad
Sojourn
Traveling the network of tunnels around and beneath my tribe’s village wasn’t actually particularly hard, largely due to the diligent work of my former comrades, the rangers. The frozen skin of Ravanur was always shifting, moving and changing. Cracks would open in a day and close in a week. Burug would carve tunnels in their incessant search for food, and then those tunnels would collapse. Very rarely did my people actually cut our own passages- the ice moved enough that it was barely worth the effort. Instead, we marked the ways we found, exploring the twisting labyrinth daily and keeping a running knowledge of all of the paths through the ice near our home. This meant that getting from the Deepseeker’s hidden sanctum to Joanna’s old campsite wasn’t particularly complicated; once I left the tunnels that the ranger’s had no record of. The hard part was remaining unseen.
I moved carefully through the tunnel network, reading the scrawled shorthand ranger-sign scratched into the ice at regular intervals. The trick was staying in the tunnels that were just old enough to be somewhat riskier to use. No one wanted to use an old passage that might collapse or close on them without warning. Passages more than seven days old tended to be avoided. They were traveled only by whichever unlucky ranger had been assigned to scout out the dangerous trail. I stuck to those riskier routes, trusting my former comrade’s instinctive wariness to work to my advantage. For the most part, it worked. I passed beneath the tribal home of the Erin-Vulur with little trouble, completely avoiding being seen in the process. Once I got close to the fallen campsite, however, it was a completely different story. Warriors and Stormcallers alike, crawled all through the passages near where Joanna’s tower had fallen.
This proved to be a true test of my stealth. I spent an hour hidden in a tiny crack in a tunnel ceiling, observing my tribesmen and their movements, finding the pattern. Of course, they didn’t follow a pattern of movement exactly, no one did, especially warriors looking out for danger. Falling too rigidly into a pattern would leave an opening for someone like me to exploit. But searching for someone or something always caused people, warriors or not, to follow established methods- and I knew my people’s methods. A hidden route would present itself, and when it did...
Now. I slipped from my hiding spot, pleased with how smoothly my new crystalline armor moved. I didn’t feel hindered at all. I stepped carefully, following far behind the shadow of the latest ranger on scouting duty, making sure not to scuff or scrape th
e ice beneath my feet. He led me in a circle, through a deteriorating burug tunnel and out into a passage that was much smoother, more neatly shaped. This one had been made by a Stormcaller, and a talented one at that. It was one thing to stir up the winds like all of the other wind shamans, but only a skilled few could wield power with such fine control as one would need to bore a specific route through the ice. This had been the way the warriors had used to get to Joanna’s campsite. I shook my head. They had sent a full war party- that was the only reason to dig a direct passage like this. Why would the elders have gone so far to destroy her? She hadn’t posed a threat to us at all, except for the Stormcaller she had apparently killed, but that had been self-defense. Something else seemed wrong about all this. How had they mustered so much force so quickly? Yes, the Erin-Vulur could scramble a quick strike force with little effort- the rangers were always out and about, and it was a simple matter of leaving ranger sign with new orders near the intersections in the patrolled tunnels. But to get all of the warriors, all the Stormcallers- to muster the tribe as a large war party- that took serious coordination. That took planning. It hit me like a slap across the face. They had meant to destroy Joanna from the start. They hadn’t sent me to learn about her, they hadn’t sent me to strike up some kind of accord- they had sent me as a distraction while they got ready. They had used me. Had Nissikul known? Did I really want to know the answer to that question?
Volistad: Paranormal Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Alien Mates Book 3) Page 13
